


just another heart in need of rescue

by queenundisputed



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 06:57:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2803646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenundisputed/pseuds/queenundisputed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A moping pirate and a curious mermaid find themselves stranded on an island together. Said pirate consistently fails at disproving his good heart and said mermaid finally finds the prince she's been looking for, sort of. They never find out who's at fault for all this despite having the argument more than once.</p>
            </blockquote>





	just another heart in need of rescue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amasveritas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amasveritas/gifts).



> A WILD BIRTHDAY HOOKRIEL FIC APPEARS! 
> 
> This goes AU just after Hook takes his ship back during the flashback in The Jolly Roger. Basically, it's a fix it fic for The Jolly Roger because screw that episode, am I right? Anyway, I really hope you like it, bb! All the typos are my fault for procrastinating the crap out of this and only figuring out how it began at the very last minute despite staring at an outline and two separate opening drafts for days. You know how it goes. 
> 
> But look! The plot actually makes sense this year, and it's twice as long as well. SO HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BEC. <333 ENJOY YOUR FIC!

There was something undeniably cruel and no little amount of ironic about two creatures of the sea being stranded on an island from which there was no foreseeable escape. 

The waves lapping against the shore whispered enticingly; a sound that would have once been the sweetest lullaby transformed into something quite contemptible. The light breeze on the air was a burn against skin instead of refreshingly cool. And the damn sea birds, those were the worst of all. Their freedom was mocking, a constant squawking reminder that there was no conceivable way off Blackbeard’s blasted island. 

Ariel kicks her legs and the resulting spray of sand hits Hook square in the face. “Stop moping,” she says. 

“What else would you have me do then, love?” He spits the question back at her, narrowing his eyes into a pointed glare. This was, after all, her fault. The earnest set of her mouth, her wondering eyes, and her damnable hair of flame. If she hadn’t come along with tales of her lost prince and, more importantly, his lost ship, they wouldn’t be in this mess. 

“I don’t know, but your moping is so loud, I can barely hear myself think!” Ariel twists at the fabric of her clothes. She’s too hot, and Hook is distracting in every way possible. The itch and scratch of the sand under her palms doesn’t help to calm her thoughts either. 

“Aha, well I’d wager that we’d be better off if you and your pretty head were kept from thinking. You _thinking_ is what got us into this mess in the first place,” Hook grouses, eyeing her sand filled hands suspiciously. Would she throw sand at him again? His facial grooming was already suffering from being stranded on an island, and he didn’t need her making it worse with sand to the face every other minute. 

Ariel clenches her fists together and Hook winces, anticipating another shower of sand. “My fault? You think this is _my fault_?” 

He doesn’t remember her voice being this shrill. What was it with these princess types and yelling at him? Snotty, the whole lot of them from Emma Swan onwards. He ignores the twinge in his heart at the thought of Emma Swan, and refocuses on the angry mermaid in front of him. 

“Of course it’s your fault, love,” he says.

“Did you hit your head when you were thrown from your ship? You were the one who forced Blackbeard to walk the Jolly Roger’s plank. This is definitely your fault, pirate.”

“You started this,” he replies, brandishing the pointy end of his hook in her direction, “With all your fancy talk of saving your prince, my ship, and my good heart.” 

He sneers at her. 

Ariel does her best to suppress an eye roll. “Advice which you promptly ignored! You only proved that you’re a selfish, lying, blood thirsty pirate, and frankly, I am immensely put off by your presence.”

Hook throws out his arms to encompass to entirety of the island. “It’s fairly large for an island, love, so don’t let me keep you.”

Ariel huffs, stands, and wipes the sand off of the backs of her legs. “Fine.”

“Fine,” Hook replies, and Ariel walks away. 

\---

He would like to say he knows how to keep himself entertained. While that’s true, there are only so many solitary activities one man can enjoy before he starts craving another’s company. He manages about half a day before he seeks out his fishy companion. He finds her gathering shells on the other side of the island. She seems unsurprised that he’s found her, and she offers him a shell. 

“For luck,” she says.

He holds the shell in his hand, caressing the rough surface with the pad of his thumb as he stares out at the open ocean. He allows himself a moment to think of what life might have been like if Storybrooke hadn’t been torn apart by yet another curse. Perhaps he would have wooed Emma Swan into his arms by now. Certainly he wouldn’t be stuck on an island for the next part of forever. Perhaps that small seed of guilt he can feel in his stomach wouldn’t be growing. 

“What did I say about the moping, Captain?” Ariel says, tossing another shell at his head. 

“Oy, watch it,” he yells at her, rubbing at his ear where the shell had hit before skittering off down the shore. 

“Sorry,” she replies, grinning at him and ducking her shoulders. 

“You’ve got a knack for violence, love,” he says, nodding in approval. “No need to apologise for that.”

She looks him sideways, her perfect mouth twisted into a frown. He smirks at her. 

“I’ll make a selfish, blood thirsty pirate out of you yet, lass,” he says as he strolls away from her. He chuckles to himself as a shell whizzes past his head, dangerously close. 

\---

He builds a fire before the sun sets, and she slowly makes her way over, shivering ever so slightly. Hook doesn’t offer her his coat the way Eric might have offered his cloak. Sailors both men may be, but beyond that they are vastly different. The thought strikes a chord in her head, but she isn’t sure quite how the rest of the music goes just yet. 

The music in her head was the one thing that had kept her sane when her voice had been locked away tightly, held in a magic cage. She’s learned to trust the melodies that drift around in her head. A discordant noise indicates danger, the ever-shifting , frantic sounds of someone twitchy usually tells her that they’re up to no good, and the soothing, warm tones that remind her of her mother let her know that whoever she’s with is safe. 

She inches closer to the fire with her hands out and looks at Hook’s face shrouded in shadow. His music is just as dark, but she can make out the flashes of gold that have nothing to do with his preferred moniker of pirate captain. Those flashes of bright gold music are his true heart, she knows, and that heart is good, can be good, if only he’d give it a chance. 

She sighs.

“Doubloon for your thoughts, darling?” He throws another piece of driftwood on the fire and observes how the flickers of light play across her face and dance along the edges of her hair like molten lava. 

“What was in it for you?”

“I haven’t the faintest clue what you’re talking about, love,” he replies. 

“Helping them in Neverland, I mean. What was in it for you?”

Hook is quiet for a long time, looking into the fire so intensely that she’s worried he’ll burst into flame himself. She’s wholly unprepared for him to look up at her suddenly, his gaze boring straight into her soul. 

“The same thing you’ve gone on your rescue mission for, I suspect,” he says, finally. 

“True love?” She presses her hand close to her heart and wraps the other around her upper arm to fend off the cold ocean wind. 

He smirks, but he isn’t looking at her when he does it. The smirk is directed inward, and she feels the sharp steel of his self criticism as though he were holding a knife to her throat. The situation is eerily similar to the night they met, and she remembers the dangerous press of his body to hers with only the cold bite of metal between them. It had felt safer then when she’s had righteous anger as armour. 

Now? 

Now it feels raw, and the music in her head is achingly sad and equally as sweet. 

“Something like that, perhaps,” he replies, breaking the outward silence and her inward symphony. He catches her gaze with his own once more, and the flash of gold is so bright it takes her breath away. 

“But what would a selfish, blood thirsty pirate know about love, eh?”

In between blinks to clear her vision, she catches him retreating back into the darkness, a flask of rum at his lips. 

\---

His rum situation is becoming dire. He shakes his flask, holding it up toward the sun and squinting at it in hopes that it will suddenly acquire a fresh supply of alcohol. Shaking it again, roughly this time, he grunts in disappointment before hurling the flask toward the water. Instead of a satisfying splash, the flask thunks against the magical barrier around the island and lands with a dull thud in the sand. 

He glares at the glinting metal for a moment before giving up and walking down to retrieve it. It is still alarmingly empty when he picks it up. 

“Hook, come help me!” Ariel calls from farther up the beach. She’s standing on her tip toes and reaching up into a tree on the edge of a grove that heralds the beginning of the lush island centre. 

“As milady commands,” Hook mutters, once again cursing his rotten luck at finding himself stuck on magical islands with beautiful princesses. 

She watches him trudge up the hill of sand toward her with a smile playing at the corners of her lips. She’s becoming quite adept at cutting his moping short. 

“What can I do for you, love?” He leans against the tree she’s reaching up into, and he is incredibly close. She can smell the heat, the sweat, and the leather all mixed together on his skin. 

“I’m not tall enough,” she says simply and lowers herself down off her tip toes, moving aside so he can reach up in her stead. 

He smirks at her, eyeing her up and down. She crosses her arms over her chest and looks away, for a brief moment uncomfortable. Eric had certainly never looked at her like _that_. 

“Will this satisfy your hunger, love?” His face is close enough that his words whisper over the skin of her cheek. A shudder runs through her, and her eyes go unfocused. 

“What?”

He holds up the coconut. “Your lunch?”

She laughs weakly and takes the fruit into her shaky, sweaty hand. “Thanks.” 

Not for the first time she feels every inch the fish out of water she truly is, and she looks past his knowing smile and out at the ocean, letting the rush of longing consume her for a moment. 

“What I wouldn’t give for a swim right now,” she sighs, leaning against the tree and ever so deliberately away from Hook. 

“Right now, love, I’d swim the breadth of the ocean just to get as far away from this bloody island as humanly possible,” he says, leaning against the same tree and ever so deliberately closer to her. 

They stand in silence for awhile, both gazing out at the water as the sun slowly sinks behind the horizon. The air is just turning cold, and Ariel is just about to suggest they start building a fire when he speaks:

“How did you meet? You and your...whatever his name is.”

He waves Eric’s name away with a flourish of his hook, and she feels only slightly guilty that she lets him. 

“Oh it was wonderful,” she replies, eyes going wide because if nothing else, it truly was. “I’d just gotten legs, there was a grand ball, I had a beautiful dress, the sea of people parted, and there he was!”

“Right,” he says arching one eyebrow and looking down at her, sending her beatific smile tumbling into a frown. 

She slaps him lightly on the arm in protest. “It was magical!”

“Oh, I believe you,” he says, but the curl of his lips into a sneer belies his true feelings on the matter.

“Well, how did you meet the woman you’re pining over then?”

He jerks back as though she’s hurt him. His eyes are wide and his lips parted. 

“There’s no woman. No pining,” he says with a shake of his head. But all she hears is _how did you know_?

“Come on, it was obvious! There is a woman right? Maybe...” she ponders over it a little bit to keep him on his toes, and she can practically hear him grinding his teeth from here; she has him in the palm of her hand. “Emma Swan?”

He looks away from her, toward the ocean again. His whole face is tense; the line of his jaw clenched tight and fraught with tension. He swallows hard once, and she follows the movement of his throat with greedy eyes. She’s always been curious, and she is finding new, interesting nooks and crannies of Captain Hook to explore every day. If she keeps worrying at it, she’s sure to uncover treasure at some point. 

“It’s her, right? How did you meet then?”

He clenches his fist and closes his eyes tightly as though he’s in pain. But then he shifts, deflates as he lets out a long sigh. He turns back to her with a soft smile that ghosts around his eyes and keeps his teeth hidden like a secret. 

“She held a knife to my throat,” he says as he leans in close to her, pushing a lock of red hair behind her ear. “It was...how did you put it? Ah yes, magical.”

She narrows her eyes at him, lets his confession roll around in her head, but every time it strikes a note, it sounds off key, wrong somehow. It doesn’t fit the song of him. She shakes her head, dislodging the hair he’d carefully tucked away. 

“No, that’s not it, is it? That’s not when you met her at all,” she says. 

“Of course it is,” he says with a frown. She’s not sure if it’s meant as a warning or if he’s simply confused. 

“Well, that might have been the actual, literal moment you met, but that’s not what I was talking about,” she explains. 

He mulls it over for a moment, and then he grins impishly at her. “Would you like me to show you?”

The grin is a treacherous promise, but she’s curious, so curious. And she doesn’t think they’ll be getting off this island any time soon so, really, what did it matter? She could handle it. 

She meets him threat for threat, closing the gap between them, getting into his personal space the way he crowded into her’s so often, and grinning right back. 

“Sure,” she says. 

He sucks in a breath because he hadn’t expected her to be this brave. But here she is, standing toe-to-toe with him saying yes even though she has no idea what’s in store. She was willing to leap without even bothering to look. Something deep in his chest uncoils itself, prepared to strike. When he smiles now, it’s all teeth, and he pushes all thoughts of a golden haired Swan with all her cautious smiles aside as he ducks down and captures Ariel’s mouth with his own. 

He can handle one little mermaid. 

\---

It’s midday when a ship anchors nearby, and a little dinghy makes the slow trek toward their little island. Hook sees it first, and he goes to find Ariel who has made herself scarce all morning. 

“There’s a ship,” he says, keeping himself as neutral as possible. He keeps space between them, holds his mouth still in an emotionless line, and confines his arms to the immediate space around his own body. No holding, grasping, or reaching. 

“It won’t make it through the barrier,” she says, craning her neck so she can see back the way he’d come. 

“They seem rather intent on making it to the beach,” he replies, and he chooses to walk away then. She can follow if she feels like it. 

He hears her feet dancing over the ground behind him, and he holds back a smile. 

They watch the dinghy’s progress sitting side by side on the sand. There’s some minor resistance when the wooden planks meet the magical barrier, but after only a moment, the boat slices through the obstruction with very little trouble at all. 

Ariel gets up and walks over to the men who scramble off the boat once it hits shore, and she’s all smiles and hellos as she explains that, of all things, Hook kidnapped her and was holding her prisoner on this little island, that these sailors are her last and only hope, and she’s so glad that they’ve showed up to rescue her because she feared for her virtue and her life. In that order. 

If he wasn’t so insulted, he’d be proud of her ingenuity and her acting skills. She has them eating out of the palm of her hand in no time, and he finds himself clapped in irons and thrown unceremoniously into their boat while Ariel sits primly as far away from him as she can get. The men row them away from the island; they leave with very little fanfare and no indication of the magical barrier that had kept them prisoner for the last several days. 

Hook wants to glare at the island in farewell, but when he attempts to sit up, one of the men rowing kicks him back down again. He sees Ariel press her lips together, but she says nothing in his defence. 

\---

He sits in the ship’s brig divested of his coat, his sword, and his hook. He presses his back against the wall, draws one knee up, and rests his handless arm up on it as he stares out into the murky darkness characteristic of the underbelly of a ship. 

Time seems to pass slowly, not that he can track the passage of time down in the damp and the dark. 

He knows that where ever Ariel is, she has most likely decided to let him rot down here. He thinks she is just wicked enough, deep down, to allow that. 

He closes his eyes, welcoming a more all encompassing darkness, and he loses himself in it, drifting into an easier sleep than his surroundings warrant. 

\---

A loud clank wakes him, and he’s on his feet in an instant, ready to face off against his attacker. 

Ariel laughs a little but he can hear the guilt underneath it. He can see it to, once he really looks at her and registers that she is Ariel rather than some unforeseen foe. She averts her eyes, bites her lip, and can’t seem to keep her hands still. 

“Come to gloat, love?”

“I brought you the key,” she says, pointing to the ground near his feet. This is undoubtedly the cause of the ungodly racket that had woken him. 

He picks it up, unlocking the heavy manacle that keeps him close to the wall of his cell. 

“My gratitude is warring with my disappointment that you didn’t have it in you to leave me to rot down here,” he says, looking closely at the key in the dim light. It’s heavy with a design far more ornate than any manacle key has any right to be. He slips it into his shirt for a more thorough examination later. 

“Why would I do something like that?”

He moves very fast, taking her by surprise as he presses close to the bars, reaching out to grasp her neck, pulling her close uncaring of the damage he causes her along the way. Her mouth tastes of copper when he presses his lips to hers, and she is quick to bite at his invasive tongue. He pulls back with a chuckle, but keeps his tight hold on her neck, unwilling to let her pull away. Instead, he presses his forehead to hers, breathing in the warm air between their open mouths. 

“No,” he says, voice ragged and a little hoarse, “the question is, why wouldn’t you?”

He releases her and steps back. 

She grasps the bars, swaying ever so slightly. She catches her breath, but she still looks delightfully ruffled and well kissed when she looks up at him. 

“Just because you destroy everything you touch, doesn’t mean I have to,” she replies, her voice quiet but still filling the space. He feels the walls closing in on them, wants to claw at his chest to open up his lungs. His skin is hot, and his eyes wander over the walls he can only just barely see looking for any crack he can use to escape this hole he’s dug for himself. 

He grins at her, the effect of the shadows on the planes of his face making his exposed teeth menacing in the dark. She steps back, but her foot hovers in the air, indecisive. She finally steps forward again and holds out her hand. 

“You don’t have to be this way, you know. The real you is in there somewhere,” she says. 

He laughs, “You’re mistaken, love. This _is_ the real me.”

“Is that what you’d tell Emma Swan?”

“I’d tell her whatever it is you invent to tell that fool prince of yours,” he replies, nasty and gunning for a fight because he doesn’t know what to do with himself otherwise. 

She shakes her head and fades back into the darkness, leaving him with silence and only himself for company. 

\---

The ship docks at a bustling port, ready to unload its cargo including its two unexpected additional passengers. 

Ariel stands in a spot of sunlight as two burly men manhandle Hook out of the hold. She looks at him and thinks that he looks much smaller than the last time she saw him. Without his eponymous hook, he seems defenceless and diminished. The clothes that fit him so snugly just days ago now hang off his body, and his skin seems pale, clammy, His eyes are bloodshot and the dark circles underneath him make him look like death. 

But she doesn’t run to him because she can see something in the line of his shoulders that tells her to stay put. 

One man shouts to the ship’s captain asking what’s to be done with the prisoner, and Ariel holds her breath as she waits for the answer. They’ll be taking him to the local magistrate, of course. Ariel shifts from foot to foot, wishing she could dive into the water, trade her legs for a tail, swim away, and be done with Hook once and for all. But she can’t. 

“Wait,” she says, reaching out for Hook. He looks up at her out of tired eyes, and she sees the same spark she saw earlier. Still, she can tell he’s glad she’s not quit of him just yet. 

“Don’t worry, dear heart, you’re in much better hands now,” the Captain says wrapping his arms around her waist. The Captain has been overly familiar since she’s come aboard, but this is as forward as he’s been so far. She tries to twist out of his arms, but he holds her fast. This doesn’t feel the same as Hook holding her neck and refusing to let her run. This feels like a vice, like a trap, and she actually _wants_ to run. 

“Let me go,” she orders. She sees Hook twitch in her direction and winces as one of the men holding him smacks him upside the head. 

“I don’t think so,” the Captain coos in her ear. He straightens up but keeps his arms tightly wrapped around her. He tips his head at his men, and they drag Hook toward the ramp off the ship. 

And then they are a jumble of limbs and howls of pain as Hook throws himself into doing as much damage to them as possible to incapacitate them. Ariel takes her cues from him and begins to struggle harder in the Captain’s arms, but she, for all her bravado, isn’t nearly as good at physical combat as she made out to be. Under the water, she would have taken the Captain easily, but on land? Well, the only reason she’d gotten the jump on Hook was the element of surprise. 

The Captain takes her arm and pulls her roughly off the ship, bypassing the brawl with elegant ease. He pulls her close again, wrapping one arm around her waist with an easy smile. She tries to twist away, but he’s stronger than his lithe frame makes him look. 

And then his arm falls away and his body drops to the ground. She watches the blood pool out around the silver hook embedded into the Captain’s back in horror. Her eyes are wide and the air dries them out because no matter how much she wants to, she can’t blink and make this go away. 

Finally— _finally_ —she looks up at Hook who hovers nearby his face drawn into grim, heavy lines. 

“You killed him,” she whispers, her voice wavering and breaking because breath is barely making it into her lungs. 

She’s seen bloated dead bodies before, watched sailors she couldn’t save drift down, down, down to their deaths. Occasionally, they washed ashore and she did as much to honour them as she could. This is different though. This body still looks alive. It’s bright, pink, still warm, and moments before it had been breathing. 

She opens and closes her mouth again and again, searching for the words. 

“You killed him,” she says again, and her voice sounds just the way it did when she asked her father ‘ _when is mommy coming home?_ ’ even when she knew the answer was ‘ _never_ ’. 

Hook falls to his knees beside the body and bloodies his hand pulling his hook out of the man’s back. He looks at her as he rises to his feet once more, blood making the dark cloth of his breeches look even darker. 

“You knew the type of man you were getting into bed with when you met me, didn’t you?”

She sobs a little then, a choked, painful sound that escapes without her meaning it to. 

He hasn’t taken his eyes off her, but now his gaze softens just a little. 

“He was going to hurt you,” he says, and she can hear the rawness of his voice. It’s like his version of a sob, the sob of a man who has learned not to cry in the face of horror and death. She raises a trembling hand as though to reach for him, but she pulls it back, almost ashamed of how she’s falling to pieces. 

“He was going to hurt you,” Hook says again, but it’s quieter this time as though he’s trying to convince himself. 

She looks around at the empty street, at the dead body at her feet, and then at the man in front of her. He’s trembling just as she is, and it breaks her heart just a little. She knows this man now, she thinks, and just as she’d said in the beginning, he had some good left in him. He’s killed this man because he was going to hurt her. Not for revenge or pettiness or just to prove he could. He’s done it to save her. 

That’s how they’re both going to choose to rationalize this, and she hears that note sound in her head, clear and pure and true. And she throws herself at Hook, burying her head in his shoulder, and unconcerned about the blood on his hand as he places it gently against the small of her back. 

\---

He watches her sleep wrapped up in his coat, her hair spilling over the black leather in a splash of brilliant red. He cradles her head as the wagon jostles over yet another bump in the road, and he glares at the back of their driver’s head. 

Traveling this way was easy and cheap, and it was the best he could do at short notice with very little money to speak of. And as long as Ariel didn’t wake, it was certainly better than nothing. 

He’d thrown the body into the water, watching it sink down as Ariel buried her head in his back, still crying. He’d left her for only moments to retrieve his possessions from the ship, dodging wary glances from the injured crewmen as he did so. He’d bundled her in his coat, knowing it was all he could do for her for now, and he’d steered her in the direction of the busier, populated section of the port to look for a way out of the city. 

Her eyes flicker open, and she smiles up at him, momentarily confused. He strokes her hair because he wants to mostly, but also because he knows the gesture will soothe her. She likes when he touches her hair. He learned that on the island. 

“Where are we?”

“On our way to find your prince,” he says, and the smile on his face is genuine because it’s for her. 

“But I...” she begins, trailing off and leaving the ‘ _already found him_ ’ unspoken because they both know it isn’t true. 

He traces the lines of her face with the pad of this thumb. “You found a pirate, love, and a broken hearted one at that. You deserve much better.”

“I know,” she says as she snuggles into his side, pulling his coat closer around her shoulders. 

“I’m glad you agree,” he says with a chuckle. 

“I didn’t want to hurt your fragile ego,” she replies, her lofty tone spoiled when she breaks into giggles of her own. 

“You are generous as you are beautiful, my lady,” he says. 

She imagines him in a ballroom, dressed in the airs and clothes of a gentleman: white cuffs, tan jacket, soft eyes, and his back bent in a gracious bow. She imagines herself in a white dress, with her red hair spinning as he twirls her in a dance. The kiss he leaves on the top of her hand is polite and sweet. 

The music notes jangle in her head, mismatched and dissonant. 

Not a prince, no, and certainly not _her_ prince. Maybe not her anything. 

\---

He puts her on a ship at the next port, promising her that this Captain has no designs on her body. Says he knows the man personally, and then turns to the Captain in question with death in his eyes, makes the man swear on his life to see her safely to her destination, where ever that might be. 

She leans off the side of the ship and calls down to him, “We’ll meet again, Hook.”

“Killian,” he says back to her. She smiles. 

“We’ll meet again, Killian,” she repeats, acquiescing to his request and using his given name. The music of it sounds better in her head anyway even if names have never been all that important to her. 

“I’m sure we will, love, and I’d like to meet that prince of yours,” he says, hitting the palm of his hand with his hook restlessly. 

“And I’d like to properly meet your Emma,” she agrees. 

She reaches out her hand as though to stop his fidgeting even though he’s too far away to touch. 

“Hey,” she calls, “stop moping.”

He grins, flashing her teeth, and she’s surprised to find them innocent and hardly dangerous at all. 

“As you wish,” he says, bowing to her with a flick of his dark coat. When he meets her eyes again, he’s serious, but he says nothing. 

And that’s how it ends.

\---

She washes up on the shores of Storybrooke on a mission. She’s looking for a man, she says to the local townsfolk who don’t seem to remember her even though she’s met many of them already. 

A curse, they explain, and her heart seizes up. Would he even remember her?

Snow White finds her, takes her home for dry clothes, and tells her that there’s a man that might be able to help, someone the curse didn’t get who might know where the man she lost at sea might be. 

And they walk to the diner together. 

Killian stands when they walk in, and Ariel walks over to him with barely contained excitement after David finished speaking with him. 

“Can you help?”

“You’re looking for a prince?” He looks at her but does his best not to look at her. She can’t tell if he knows who she is or not. 

“Sort of,” she says. “He’s a sailor, a captain really. I lost him at sea; my ship sailed without him on it.”

“I’m sorry, love, I don’t—” 

“Remember?” She finishes the sentence for him. 

He cocks his head to one side and studies her with conflicted eyes. He’s silent so long that she knows he’s gone off into some place filled with guilt and anger and blood. So she reaches out and places one hand on his cheek.

“No moping,” she instructs. 

He grins at her, and now she knows he remembers. He hasn’t forgotten a single thing. 

“Anyway, you may have heard of him. He’s the Captain of the Jolly Roger? But I didn’t see his ship at the docks. Maybe he didn’t come over with the curse?” Her smile is coy and she bats her eyelashes at him. 

There’s a beat where she wonders if she’s overstepped, gone too far, that maybe he didn’t want this after all and she’s just been incredibly stupid and childish and silly thinking he actually wanted her the way she discovered she wanted him, but then he holds out his hand. 

“I think I’ve heard of him,” he says, swopping down to kiss her.

She hears Snow’s gasp and David’s strangled yelp in the background, and she smiles against Killian’s mouth. He pulls away. 

“I didn’t think we’d really meet again,” he confesses. 

“I know,” she says. “So I had to prove you wrong.”

“I’m not sure my fragile ego can take it, love,” he says, hand over his heart as he leans back affecting drama. 

She grabs his hand and twirls around to face Snow. “Thanks for all your help, but I’ve found him now.”

Snow blinks at her. “Okay? Are you sure?”

“Definitely,” Ariel replies, and she drags a very willing Killian out of the diner. He calls something over his shoulder to David about a Henry and then they’re gone. 

\---

She whispers into his ear later:

“I found him. Eric, I mean,” she says and he goes still next to her, body rigid and tense, “but he didn’t know, and I...I don’t know. The music wasn’t right anymore, and for awhile I didn’t know why. Eric was perfect, and you’re just...you’re not. Except you are perfect, for me, I think.” 

She’s quiet for a moment, and he doesn’t say anything either. 

Then she continues, “Like a sunken treasure ship. Sometimes you have to look past the wreckage to find the treasure inside.”

He laughs, and she likes the way the vibrations rumble between them. 

“I suppose I deserve that comparison,” he admits, stroking her hair and kissing her brow. 

“What about you? Did you find Emma again?”

His face sobers as he says, “I did.”

“And?” She presses because she wants to know even if it hurts. Curiosity, remember?

“And nothing,” he says. “There was nothing.”

She captures his hand in her own and squeezes. In her head, deep reds and golds flash together, the visual representation of the music she can hear. It isn’t perfect, but it fits somehow; all the jagged pieces are still harsh, but the other notes smooth the space around them. 

Killian looks at their entwined hands and thinks of the earnest set of her mouth, her wondering eyes, and her damnable hair of flame. 

He tugs at her hand to get her attention. 

When she looks at him, he says, “This is your fault, you know.”

Her eyes widen to an almost comically degree, and she tightens her grip on his hand. “My fault? _This_ is my fault?”

“Of course it is,” he smiles at her as he says it and it fills his eyes. 

“Are you sure the curse hasn’t affected your head? Or did you miss the part where you got us stranded on an island with no escape and started this? It’s definitely your fault, pirate,” she says, grinning back at him. 

He swoops down and kisses her lightly on the lips, chuckling as she tries to follow him when he pulls away. 

“I think I’ll gladly take the blame for something as sweet as this, love,” he says, pulling her closer. 

“Good,” she says, and then, “Because it’s your fault.”

“Aye,” he says kissing her forehead, “you’re right,” –kissing her nose—“as you are about most things,” –kissing her cheeks one at a time and then lingering in the space right above her mouth as he breathes—“love.”

She jabs a finger at his heart. “Especially about what’s in there.”

He covers her hand with his own. “We’ll see.”


End file.
